Downstairs, I run a bath for my daughter. I kneel down to check the water.
When I rise, the old woman is standing in the doorway. She is hunched over, watching me.
“Fuck.”
And then she’s gone.
Author: T.M. Camp
-
light
In the house behind ours, the light in the high attic window keeps turning on and then off again every few minutes.
Disconcerting.
-
in the bathtub
“What’s a haunted house?”My daughter is four years old and, a few days before Halloween, she’s decided to start asking questions.
I wring out the washcloth, buying time. We don’t talk about these kinds of things around her. She has a couple of picture books, but…
“What honey?”
“What’s a haunted house?”
“Well . . . that’s a house where ghosts live.”
For a minute I think I might have dodged the real question.
Nope...
“And what’s a ghost?”
“Well...”
That’s not so easy to answer.
-
a fall
When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me.
A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen.
“Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.
After a few minutes, my wife comes downstairs. She takes me aside.
“Just before you came home, there was this huge crash from upstairs. But it wasn’t like the knocking from before. It was like someone just dumped an armful of books onto the floor right overhead. And it was fucking loud. ”
She is rattled, just a bit. I wait for her to go on.
“I went up and Vincent” — that’s one of our cats — “Was sitting on our bed, frozen. His eyes were fucking huge.”
She couldn’t find anything out of place in our room, nothing to explain the noise.
I go up to check and, yeah, there’s nothing.
Later, she notices that a framed photo on a high shelf behind our bed is laying flat on its face.
It’s a photo of the two of us.
-
hard knocks
My daughter an I are in my office when my wife calls from the TV room. I hear her but it doesn’t register until she calls again, a rising note of alarm in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
She is pale, intense. I can’t tell if she’s angry or something else.
“I just heard...”
She stops, starts again.
“Someone just knocked on the ceiling in the family room.”
She looks at me, eyes wide. “It was like this: Bang bang bang... Bang bang... Bang bang bang. It was someone knocking on the floor of our room. Fucking loud.”
I head upstairs. One of the cats is sitting on our bed. He starts when I come into the room, but he doesn’t move.
There’s a little alcove off of our bedroom, directly above the TV room on the ground floor. My wife has an antique desk and vanity in the alcove. There are photos and mementos on the window sill. A large green crystal hangs from the archway leading into the alcove.
Even still, I have never liked that part of the room. It unsettles me, open like that. When I come to bed each night, I have to resist giving any of my imagination to the mental image of who or what might be standing there waiting in the dark.
While the cat watches, I look around. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing fell.
Nothing to explain the insistent, deliberate knocking my wife heard.
-
almost
...as we’re passing through the room, I stop and take note of our surroundings: The concrete walls of the service tunnel, the exposed pipes . . . it’s all so familiar.
Then I have it. In a flash of recognition, I turn to my companions — he is tall and dark skinned, she is waif-like and pale — and say “This is exactly what the places I dream about look like. Exactly.”
They share a glance with each other and roll their eyes.
We continue on through the door.
It is only later (much later) that I realize that I almost had it. I almost had a moment of awareness there in the dream.
But what really gets me is the realization that the other people in my dream knew I was dreaming, even through I didn’t.
They knew. And they thought I was a fool.
-
shimmer
“There was something in the back hallway,” my wife tells me over dinner. “I saw it right before we were leaving.”“What did you see?”
She thinks for a moment. “It was a blur in the air, almost shimmering. Just a movement...”
Gooseflesh on my arms, the back of my neck. “That’s interesting you say that.”
“Why?”
“Tell me what else you saw. What color was it?”
“A gray-blue, a movement like...” She mimes someone passing a hand over their head. “Like someone was throwing a hood over themselves.”
I nod, even though it’s not quite a match with what I saw the previous night.
I tell her that when I was down in the basement, just as I was closing the door, something walked towards me... A shimmer in the air, like a heat mirage.
Mine was brighter, nearly transparent, almost gold.
It was there, then it was gone.
-
on the way to bed
Conversation with my four-year-old daughter...“Time to sleep, sleep and dream.”
“I don’t always remember my dreams.”
“That’s okay. They remember you.”
I think this might be the best thing I have ever said or ever will say.
-
passing by
In the upstairs bathroom, I stand and wait for my youngest daughter to finish.My back is to the door. Given my history, that’s uncommon.
As I help her down off the toilet, I catch a glimpse of someone passing behind me — walking through the hallway just beyond the door. I assume it’s my teenage daughter coming out of her room to head downstairs.
But the hair was too dark, too long. And she did not stop to say goodnight to her sister.
And there was something cold in her manner.
While my wife puts our toddler to bed, I go downstairs. My middle daughter is there on the couch.
“Have you been down here this whole time?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah, why?”
I shrug. “Just wondering” I reply . . . though I am not really wondering.
-
morning visitation
...and as I open the door leading from my office to the front of the house, I see a pale shape, not much more than the impression of a white dress moving through the light coming in the windows.
It flows from right to left.
I stop. I blink.
It is gone.
-
beginning of the end
...and my wife’s face contorts in pain, her brow furrowed. I ask her what’s wrong but, before she can answer, a wave of distortion ripples through the air like a mirage.
“Something’s happened.” I look out the window and see a mushroom cloud rising in the distance.
The television fills in the rest of the details: Every major city in the US is in chaos after multiple ‘dirty bomb’ attacks.
The footage is terrifying. People flood the streets. Suddenly we are all refugees.
Holding our daughter between us, my wife and I start making plans...
...I wake in the pre-dawn dark, wondering if this dream was just that or something more: A precognition of something to come? Or just a byproduct of sleeping with a sword under my bed?
-
stench again
That smell again. A warm, yellow smell of rotting fish.
My youngest daughter and I are in the back hallway when it drifts past. It almost seems to stop and turn back, encircling us for a moment.
I look down and see that my daughter has wrinkled her nose.
After a moment, the stench dissipates.
I can find nothing that might’ve been the source. -
a sad girl
...lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening.
I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed.
I cannot move, cannot open my eyes.
I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the hinge of my elbow.
The footsteps move away. I struggle to rise, to grasp the her arm but my hand feels strange, tingling in the air where I reach for her, a moment’s resistance . . . then the woman pulls away and walks into a little alcove on the other side of the room.
The woman is gone. It was not my wife. It was someone else, someone younger — her hair was longer, darker — and she had long scratches or cuts down her arms. And she was sad.
I cannot confidently say whether or not this was a dream.
-
jump
I dream of flight, from time to time. Even awake, it seems like the ability is just right there and all I have to do is...
-
doppelgänger
...and as I walk back into my office, I see — or I think I see — a man standing to one side and looking through my filing cabinet.It is me, myself. I am the one standing there, dressed in the same clothes I am wearing today.
I blink.
He is gone.
I am gone.
Unnerved, I get back to work.
-
bath time
“Will you check the tub in a minute?”
My wife comes into the room, a little cross. We are getting our daughter ready for bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“There was almost no water in the tub and it was cold.”
“Really?”
She repeats this again. Unspoken is the rebuke — or, perhaps, the fear — that something odd has happened.
It was full, I know. And warm. I checked it myself just a few minutes earlier.
-
ghost weather
Early summer afternoon. Overcast skies.
Waiting for storms.
The house is gray. Quiet.
Pale light from outside, dim within. The air still, dead.
Every room feels empty and full at the same time. An unseen crowd gathers.
Something around every corner.
Watchful. Waiting.
Patient.
-
the walking men
Three or four times now, while I’ve been walking in the neighborhood with my youngest daughter, I’ve seen a man wearing a long black overcoat and a fedora.
Three times now. Three different men. One of them is quite young, perhaps in his early twenties, with scraggly facial hair and glasses. Another is older, around my age. And another was a bit plump, balding. Unlike the others, he carried his hat in his hand. His face was shiny with sweat.
They do not notice me, do not give off a feeling or “vibe” of any kind. Apart from their odd (at least for the season and area) apparel, there is nothing particularly interesting about them.
They walk with purpose, always heading north.
(Strangely, this coincides with some recent reading I came across about Walter Gibson and the odd sightings at his house on Gay Street.)
-
“Hey Dad?”
Walking through the office I hear — or I think I hear — my son’s voice, very distinct and clear, call to me.
I look back down the hallway but, of course, no one is there.
-
flake
Packing up for the day, getting ready to head for home... I reach for my cell phone and watch in amazement as a bright flake of light, a translucent chip of yellow-white light about the size of my fingernail, floats up from the screen towards my face.
I blink, shake my head. It is gone.
-
stench
Over the holidays, there were a number of points when I noted a pungent smell in the little hallway at the back of our kitchen — a cloying stench, like rotting fish.
(I do not care for this little hallway. It feels off to me, somehow. There is a mirror of it upstairs and the one gives me a vague sense of unease as well — though I have not noticed any phantom smells there.)
More than once I looked everywhere trying to find the source of the smell — searching in the hallway as well as the adjoining rooms. But there was nothing. And, oddly enough, the smell seemed to fade away as I searched.
Other times, most times, there was no smell at all.
I mentioned it finally to my wife who said she’d had the same experience on numerous occasions but couldn’t find an explanation for the smell either.
It was puzzling and — not surprising, given my usual temperament — a bit eerie.
Late one evening as I was getting ready for bed, I was in the shower — the bathroom is located off of the little hallway — when the same rotting smell suddenly rose up around me, permeating the steam of the shower. I gagged, nearly vomiting from the sudden, overpowering stench.
And, inexplicably, every hair on my body and scalp stood on end. I was chilled, despite the heat of the shower.
After a few moments, it passed.
After I got out of the shower, I checked the drains — the most likely source of the smell. Nothing.
We have not experienced the smell since.
-
the short
We’re in the back bedroom, my wife and I. Fucking.
It’s hard sometimes to find the time, the moment. Children, work, day-to-day life — these things conspire and distract and exhaust.
But we find the time, when we can. We find the moments, synchronized, together. And it is good. Perhaps it is too brief, too short. But we know each other so well now.
Like tonight. Together in the bed in the back bedroom — my absent son’s bedroom converted to a guest room for the time being.
The room sits in the relationship corner of our home, according to my understanding of feng shui. So, I suppose, it’s good that we don’t leave it empty. It’s good we fill it, from time to time, with each other.
As we fuck, the window rattles — the expected ice storm has arrived.
Reaching the end, of our short time — doing my best to hold out as long as I can, to stretch the moment and the movement as long as possible — I look up at my wife’s beautiful face shrouded in shadow. A moment later there is a flash of light and she laughs, suddenly visible.
The bedside lamp has turned on by itself.
It flickers, then goes dark.
This happens, more or less, five or six times before we’re finished.
It almost seems to be an accompaniment to my wife’s final burst of lovemaking, a response to her rising and falling.
After she heads to the shower, I inspect the lamp. I try to find a reason for the erratic interruption. Nothing I do will replicate the odd flashing.
I unplug it, just in case there is a short.
For the rest of the evening, even now, I’m fighting the feeling that someone is just behind me — quiet, waiting.
Outside, the ice storm seems to have passed. It is cold. My hair is on end. I do not know if I will sleep tonight.
